Python in the browser

Shaun Taylor-Morgan

You don't have to write JavaScript to write front-end code. There are a lot of options to run Python in the browser. We'll look at how this is achieved - there's more than one way to do it!

I've never quite got on with JavaScript, but it's the only choice for writing dynamic web pages, isn't it?

Actually, no! You can run Python in the web browser.

There are quite a few projects out there that enable Python in the browser in a variety of ways. Each has a different approach - compiling Python to JavaScript at runtime, compiling Python to JavaScript ahead-of-time, interpreting pre-compiled Python bytecode, implementing an entire Python interpreter in WebAssembly...

There's a more general lesson to draw from this - the web stack has always been constrained to involve JavaScript, but now people are beginning to create more options. The advent of WebAssembly will surely make this the norm. We're seeing a move to a web where developers can take more control over how they build things.